Animal Kingdom
by chrissie
Summary: Gen. Fuji turns into a cat, Ryoma turns into a bird.
1. I am a cat, by Fuji Shuusuke

I am a cat, by Fuji Shuusuke

That morning, Fuji awoke with cat ears and a tail.

"Hmm," he said, inspecting himself. It sounded almost like a purr.

He went down for breakfast, where his family took it in stride.

"I would have expected something vulpine," said Yumiko, while his mother puttered around cutting holes in his trousers to let the tail through. Yuuta, safe in his dorm, remained blissfully unaware, which was just as well.

Before he left, his sister asked: "Would you like a belled collar? I have one in navy blue, to go with your uniform."

He tilted his head, considering. It was the decent thing to give the mice a sporting chance. "Maybe tomorrow," he said. "I'm kind of at a disadvantage today." He lashed his tail, and lurched a little from the shift in balance.

At school, the kids stared, but he ignored them serenely and attended classes as usual. Eiji poked him from behind with a pencil.

"Psst," he whispered. "Fuji, Fuji. Can I touch?"

Fuji considered saying no, but decided in the end that that was just mean.

He lauded his choice later on when it turned out that Eiji was very good with his hands; it was almost welcome when the teacher turned them both out of the classroom for improper conduct, and they took the leisure to explore the advantages to Fuji's new appendages.

A student on his way back from the restroom paused to goggle at them, and Fuji smiled at him, perfectly friendly. It wasn't his fault that his teeth had become so much sharper.

"It's too bad you don't have kitty claws." Eiji pinched his pink, cleanly-cut nails thoughtfully. "Wouldn't that be totally fun?"

Fuji thought of the intermittant desire he had had since the morning to bat at moving objects. "For me, maybe," he said. "I wonder if you would like it as much."

"Of course I would! It would be like a real-life hentai anime!"

"I really don't think you would enjoy it much," Fuji murmured. "People with their eyes scratched out so rarely do get pleasure out of life, you know."

"Oh, meow."

Of course there was a big fuss at the club meeting after school. Tezuka frowned at him. "Can you play like that?" he said.

Fuji waved his tail back. "And a good day to you, too, Buchou."

He had a bit of trouble keeping his balance at first, but after realizing the tail could be an aid rather than a hindrance, he won every game he played until he grew bored.

As he left the tennis court, he noticed Echizen standing in the sidelines. Feeling playful, he walked close enough to brush Echizen's leg with his tail and had the satisfaction of seeing Echizen's fingers twitch.

Oishi caught up with him on the way to the vending machine. "Fuji," he said, his brows wrinkling with maternal concern, "are you okay?"

"Well, I do wish they stocked tuna rather than Ponta," Fuji said, looking over the selection, "but other than that, I'm quite well. You, Oishi?"

"Have you seen a doctor? Is there anything troubling you? I've heard that these changes can be caused by emotional pressure taking a physical manifestation -- do you feel like there's too much responsibility on your shoulders these days, and becoming a cat is the only means of escape?"

Fuji took some time to think it over. "No," he said finally, "I'm pretty sure that's not it." He would have worried over Oishi if the theory were true.

"Fujiko-neko-chan!" Kawamura boomed from behind them, startling Oishi a few steps back and making the aluminum cans rattle. He was gripping a racket loosely in his hand. "Come on, little kitty, let's play!"

Taka-san seemed so fired up and pleased with himself that it was a shame when Inui stepped up and stole the racket with one quick swipe, but perhaps it was just as well; Fuji didn't really feel up to shoe strings yet.

"Fuji," said Inui, glasses gleaming in the sun. He looked as if a houri had just been dumped in his lap. "What did you drink yesterday? Eat? Think? Do?" His notebook had appeared out of thin air, and he was scribbling quick notations into it, eyeing Fuji's new ears as if calculating the distance between them.

"Just the usual," said Fuji. "Chili peppers and ice cream. You should try it yourself one of these days, Inui-kun."

Of course that wasn't enough to deter Inui, so he finally resorted to the old "Oh, now I remember, I must've eaten a whole carton of -- that!" trick to make his escape.

There were students all over the school area, and every one of them looked at him when he passed as if he were Moses at the parting of the seas, ensuring that when Inui came feline-tracking, he would have at least a few dozen witnesses to help him out.

A cat's life just wasn't the thing, Fuji thought sadly, and resolved not to do it again if it could be helped.

He finally found a spot at the very edge of the schoolgrounds, out of sight from near all of the populated vantage points, with three cherry trees and a rhododendron bush to mask it from casual passers-by.

Fuji curled up under one of the trees and closed his eyes. His tail thumped drowsily on the grass and his ears twitched, until the sun did its magic and carried him away to sleep.

Later, maybe a little, maybe a lot, he heard footsteps, the parting of the bushes; breathing, loud to his newly sensitive hearing. _Go 'way_, he thought.

The footsteps didn't sound again, but the breathing came lower and closer, and then there was somebody stroking his hair, over and over like it was the most addictive task in the universe.

It felt good. The person smelled nice. He didn't attempt to wake Fuji, so Fuji didn't attempt to wake, and they spent the rest of the afternoon like that, snipped from reality in a tiny hiccup of time.

Fuji thought: being a cat wasn't half bad, after all.


	2. You are a bird, by Fuji Shuusuke

You are a bird, by Fuji Shuusuke

Echizen, of course, grew wings.

"That's _so cool_," said Eiji, pretending he wasn't envious, though Fuji could tell anyway because Eiji kept rubbing between his own shoulderblades checking for new growth, and Echizen, not being stupid, probably could, too. 

"Not really," he said. He didn't look unhappy about Eiji's envy. He did look unhappy about hitting his own feathers every time he swung a racket.

"You'll get used to it," Fuji told him sympathetically, remembering how awkward the tail had been at first. Now he could do tricks with it, and though he would never actually burden himself with extra baggage, _theoretically_ it was like a third hand he could use to carry things with. "And of course none of us will make fun of you before you get the hang of it, or take pictures of any interesting situations that might come up."

Echizen's growl belied his current angelic appearance, and he fanned his wings threateningly while Inui made hmm-hmm sounds around a tape measure. All that happened was a few iridescent blue-gray feathers blew off in the wind to be snatched up by Horio when he thought nobody was looking.

A throat-clearing drew all eyes to the court alley. "I trust there's an explanation for this."

Tezuka looked as stoic as ever, but when he spoke there was a grim bite in his voice that told Fuji that someone would definitely be running laps today, and the only question was how many people would be joining in. He maneuvered Taka-san into blocking his line of sight to Tezuka -- and vice versa -- and strolled away with the exact dollop of nonchalance required to actually look nonchalant and not like you were a flamingo trying very hard to hide in the desert.

Naturally, Tezuka said "Fuji," just as he prepared to turn the corner of the equipment shed.

He stopped and sighed. "Yes, Buchou?" 

An entire branch of linguistics could be devoted to the nuances of Tezuka's raised eyebrows, but this one was about as subtle as a guillotine snapping down. If Tezuka were to undergo any unusual transformations, thought Fuji resentfully as he resumed his place between Eiji and Momoshiro, he deserved to be crossed with a butterfly. A pink one.

"It's very interesting," Inui was saying, glasses gleaming with the fervor of the type of scientist who ended up on the wrong side of the bars in asylums, "there doesn't seem to be any practical use -- the power of the wings isn't nearly enough to counter human density of muscle and bone -- but as far as I can tell, they're a perfect in-scale representation of bird wings. Some species of hawk."

"Nothing more fitting, eh, Echizen?" said Momoshiro with a wink and an elbow nudge, after which Echizen proved that he didn't need to fly to make people very, very sorry for teasing him.

"I don't want them," he said eventually, running an absent hand over the ridge where the wings started sloping down. "Can't they be removed? Cut off, something?"

"I doubt it," Inui answered over Eiji's indignant squawk. "That is to say, it can obviously be achieved, but not without major physical trauma." 

Echizen frowned. "They slow me down," he said, and Fuji didn't need to be the mind-reader he was occasionally accused of playing to know that Echizen was weighing physical trauma against the emotional trauma of never playing tennis again (or perhaps worse: playing tennis and sucking at it), and if they left him to his own devices he'd probably be looking for a butcher knife first thing when he got home.

"Can you try flapping them as you run? " He wasn't a very _nice_ senpai, but he didn't want to see Echizen show up tomorrow with two bloody stumps where the wings used to be. The wings were rather pretty, after all, and Fuji liked pretty things to look at. "Maybe they can actually speed things up." 

"They're not toys," and he couldn't be the only one who'd realized by now that Echizen was seriously upset underneath the usual prickliness.

That was the trouble with putting all your eggs in one basket, and on some level he couldn't help but be pleased that Echizen was finally learning this lesson -- you'd think insurmountable misfortune was something that happened only to other people, to see him and Tezuka go at it, and just yesterday he'd been wondering what it would take for Echizen to realize that being conspicuous, being unique, _wasn't_ always a good thing -- but this wasn't how he'd choose for it to come about.

"Just try," he wheedled, rubbing an arm over his ears for good measure. One of the perks of his fashionable cat accessories was that when he made kittenish moves now, cat people melted into goo. 

Echizen gave him the _I-see-through-you-'cause-I'm-not-stupid-like-you_ glare, but everyone knew that the only reason Karupin wasn't eating caviar and sleeping on a velvet cushion every day of his life was because he didn't like caviar and preferred Echizen's stomach to cushions. "Fine," he muttered finally, and took off.

After a while, Momoshiro said, "Wow. Buchou, do we still have to run laps with him in the future? Because he's going to make the rest of us look very bad."

Tezuka was gazing after Echizen with his speculative eyebrow-tilt. "We'll have to hope that the advantage doesn't get him disqualified."

When Echizen returned, he looked more cheerful already, his wings somehow achieving a jaunty angle that, along with his capbrim, announced his superiority to the world. He picked up his racket and slapped it against his palm. "Another go, Eiji-senpai?"

"Oh, fine," Eiji grumbled, and Fuji patted him on the shoulder as he took his place on the court.

It wasn't long before they discovered that Echizen still hadn't fixed his racket-hitting-feathers problem, which brought back Eiji's grin, and as it was obviously just a matter of time before the problem was resolved, Echizen's remained in place, too. Happily ever after. 

"Strange, how these things are happening," Tezuka murmured right next to him. He did his best not to jump.

"Isn't it?" Something about the situation nagged at him but he couldn't pin it down, and really, it couldn't be that important now that everything was fixed. 

When Tezuka came to school the next day sporting huge, delicate insect wings the color of strawberry frosting, Fuji began to rethink his assumptions. 

prince of tennis main comment  



End file.
